The Heel Champion Over the Face: Why Heel’s Should Be on Top Longer

The Heel Champion Over the Face: Why Heel’s Should Be on Top Longer


“The Nature Boy” Ric Flair, John “Bradshaw” Layfield, “Superstar” Billy Graham, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Yokozuna, Triple H, Vader, “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan, and Chris Jericho. What do all these former World Champions have in common? As heels, they had longer title reigns than they had a faces, and longer than the faces around the time they were World Champions.

Why would the wrestling companies have longer reigns with their World title with a heel than a face? In my opinion, to bring in fans to buy tickets, to watch the program on television, and order the pay-per-views. I say that because when we have the face defeat the heel for the World title, the fans would be happy, and we can throw more heels at him to build another big heel to challenge him and win the title.

Look at Ric Flair when he was the NWA/WCW World Heavyweight Champion in his prime. Flair had the title most the most part during his reigns as champ. He was able to go from territory to territory and face the top babyface and make them look even better than they normally look for the World Heavyweight Championship, win by skinning the cat, and go to the next territory and defend the championship another night. I’ve heard interviews done about heel champions don’t work, but Ric Flair worked as World Heavyweight Champion Heel, he is considered to be the greatest World Heavyweight Champion in pro wrestling history.

Let’s look more modern World Champs, let’s look to after the draft in the WWE, and let’s look at John “Bradshaw” Layfield. I’ll put it out there; he isn’t as good in the ring as Ric Flair. Heck, at JBL’s prime, wrestling ability, he’s nowhere close to Flair on Flair’s bad day. But JBL is what the WWE needed in 2004. JBL won the WWE Championship at the Great American Bash in 2004 after defeating Eddie Guerrero in a Texas Bullrope Match, where we seen JBL sweet gallons and bleed buckets. JBL can talk people to the arena and talk them to put their butts in seats. JBL didn’t have to wrestle great like Ric Flair, JBL had to brawl, had to use his power moves, his “Last Call” fall-away slam, and his Clothesline From Hell to take his opponents. JBL was the longest reigning World Champion in Smackdown history, since the show’s been around in the past ten years. To me, that’s a great World Champion.

I know there’s other great heel World Champs, like Graham, Savage, Hogan, to name a few, that I didn’t mention, but if you look at then they were faces and World Champs, their title runs were a lot shorter than their heel runs. And when you look at their heel runs, their title runs were longer than the face title runs around theirs. As a conclusion, Heel World Heavyweight Champions are smart for the business, for the title history, for the fans, and for the babyfaces. To quote the greatest World Heavyweight Champion in pro wrestling history… “To be the man, you have to beat the man!”